Time is money, and using it wisely in the restaurant industry is critical.

Obviously, there’s a whole lot more that goes into running a restaurant than simply cooking the food and serving it, and those extra operational tasks can be a total time (and therefore, money) suck.

Luckily, with extra focus and the right technology, you can run your restaurant in more productive ways.

In this post we’ll run through several new technologies that can help make your restaurant more productive.

1) Workforce Schedule

Scheduling software is nothing new, but many restaurants still do shift management on paper calendars and whiteboards. They may be more behind than they think.

Here's the thing. This year, mobile app usage surpassed PC usage. Many consumers actually completely forgo personal computers and use smartphones or tablets outside of work. For restaurant workers who may not have “desk jobs”, this is likely the case.

What does all of this mean? It means that if you aren’t using a scheduling app to manage scheduling and shifts among your workforce, you could be missing out on an opportunity to engage your employees and coordinate their schedules more efficiently.

2) Inventory Management

Most independent restaurants calculate their food cost only once a month, but virtually all of the major chains calculate theirs each week. According to industry averages, chain restaurants are two to three times as profitable as independent restaurants. While frequent, consistent food costing isn't the entire reason for that profitability, it's part of it.

To accurately calculate your cost weekly, you'll need to take inventory weekly as well. While that sounds great in theory, we all know that in reality, it can be burdensome if you don’t have the right process and tools for it. Using digital tools for inventory management is another way to make this process more productive.

3) Training

Having a complete and thorough restaurant training program for every position at your restaurant is the only way to achieve a consistent customer experience, maintain high standards, and set expectations for employees.

You likely know the things you want your employees to learn - but are you running through those lessons in the most efficient way possible?

Online course materials and tests make teaching, test taking, and test grading much more scalable. For this, I’d recommend stealing a tip from the education space and looking into a learning management system, which can make course material and tests available online for your new employees.

4) Compliance Reporting

We all know it: Compliance reporting is a necessary evil that has to be done at the end of each shift to keep the doors open.

But does every manager do it? And how thoroughly? Using traditional logbooks, you just don’t know.

But digital logbooks like Squadle offer a better way by bringing order to this reporting and putting it into an app. Plus, you can use sensor technology to automate some of the reporting, eliminating the need to manually deal with it at all. It sounds too good to be true, but it's not. And it works - to the tune of decreasing reporting time by 50%.